Between the 19th and the 23rd of May, Las Vegas was once again host to the IBM Edge conference. Throughout the five days of the event, more than 5,500 technology leaders and practitioners from 55 countries participated to hundreds of sessions and discussions around the latest developments in Storage Management, IT Operations Analytics and Cloud Optimization.

Right from the beginning – the General Session on the first day of the conference – leading IBM experts like Tom Rosamilia (Senior Vice President, IBM STG) emphasized what was to be the underpinning theme of the entire event: ‘Infrastructure matters because business outcomes matter’. Why? Also on the first day of the event, IBM revealed some of the results of its latest wide ranging study of organizations (due to be released in July 2014); thus, according to the results, even though seven out of 10 organizations recognize the importance of IT infrastructure for competitive advantage and revenues, less than 10% of them say their existing IT infrastructures are fully prepared to address the proliferation of mobile devices, social media, data analytics and cloud computing.

May 19th also brought EdgeTalks at IBM Edge: a special session hosted by Surjit Chana (Vice President & Chief Marketing Officer, IBM STG), whereby TED Talks speakers Ron Finley, John Wilbanks and Peter Singer shared their inspiring insights and experiences with innovations in fields ranging from organic food forests to the latest cybersecurity concerns that affect the world. You can see the replay here.

On another front, the MSP Forum hosted impactful discussions around strategies for flexible hybrid cloud implementations and the priorities, challenges and opportunities that MSP decision makers have when it comes to software defined automation.

By the third day of IBM Edge 2014, more than 55 million impressions worldwide had been generated by the social media activities around the conference. The Social Lounge set up at the event encouraged all participants to be active in social media and the associated crowd chat led to many interesting discussions between analysts, experts and practitioners. Technical Edge - more than 150 expert technical sessions and hands-on labs, covering 14 technical tracks (including Software Defined Environments (SDE) and Storage), Winning Edge – sessions dedicated to providing cutting edge education, insights and opportunities for Business Partners and Sellers, and Executive Edge – talks around overarching aspects of Cloud, Big Data and storage infrastructure, were in full swing, and they were followed, on May 22nd and 23rd, by further engaging sessions around storage, IT Operations Analytics, Workload Automation, ITSM and more.

To wrap up, here are some more replays from the conference that you can watch at your leisure: http://www.livestream.com/ibmedge. Here’s looking forward to next year’s edition and hoping that it will prove as much fun for participants as the one that’s just ended.

With more than 90% of decision makers trending to cloud implementation to drive improved business outcomes, it is important to understand the key challenges organizations face when considering Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) in the cloud including:

How to leverage cloud storage as a storage tier for TSM

Moving data into more cost effective architecture while improving recovery

A recent survey was completed to understand how users plan to use TSM in the next three years. The trend indicates that pool usage for primary storage are -- 1). TSM dedup and 2). tier with #5 being identified as cloud. Cloud as #5! The projected growth for XaaS (anything as a service) will definitely have an impact for survey results in te next few years.

Another survey provided a view of the trend for disaster recovery (DR) pool usage over the next three years as follows: 1). TSM replication 39% (tape usage decreased); 2). Node replication increase 30%; 3). Copy storage pool backups to cloud increased to 32%.

Thus, to understand the true value that Data Protection as a Service can provide -- e.g. Xaas [BaaS, DRaas, AaaS, Iaas] the consideration includes:

Partner ecosystem -- build upon open interfaces

Transmission of data to cloud -- be selective about data that goes to the cloud

Security -- encryption in flight / at rest

Economics -- in house TSM, likely cost less

The aspects of cloud data protection solution can be summarized as:

Service Model -- services offered; managed by customer, IBM or 3rd Party

Do you need a more simplified approach for deploying Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) for Virtual Environments (VE)? Are you experiencing issues because data backup ratios promised by IBM marketing for TSM cannot be matched? Do you want to know more about how backup experts with multiple deployments are handling? Then, reading this blog can help address your questions while removing some frustration.

First, it is important to note that the solution design case study is based on TSM v6.4, yet is also valid for TSM v7.1 (announced Oct 2013) due to the following criteria:

Scalability and performance

Data reduction capabilities (deduplication)

Reporting

Administration and monitoring

Hardware snapshot (flashcopy)

Next, the case study covers a client environment with small scale number of VMs (i.e. 500); yet, the findlings / results apply to environments up to 2000 VMs. The detail outlines a strategy leveraging three elements: Transition, VSphere architecture, and Backup Storage Device Selection (see further description of elements at bottom).

The dedup ratios should be benchmarked to insure realistic estimates are used.

When considering cost and restore performance, it is important to evaluate the trade-off between performance and storage costs; consider co-location by file space (VM) with tape virtual tape library (VTL) as well as specify critical VMs configured as exception for management.

Now About Those Ratios
If you've attained a dedup ratio closer to 3:1 that can actually equate to 25:1 reduction ratio when you consider whether reduction is based on change data versus the data of entire environment. The case study also examined network constraints, VTL selected and sizing.

Therefore, the main takeaway -- with the right strategy, use of TSM blueprinte and the following simplified estimate considerations: